Country Bear Jamboree to get the Tiki Treatment

The Magic Kingdom’s Country Bear Jamboree show is about to get the Enchanted Tiki room treatment. Apparently, modern audiences won’t sit still for the 15 minute show length. The show is scheduled to go down for a refurbishment on August 22nd and the rumor is that they’ll be shortening the show by 4 to 5 minutes to meet this new attention span. Where Tiki Room lost the sedate Offenbach segment, the main segment rumored to be removed is the cruder “Mama don’t shoot little Buford” song, which many feel reflects poorly in a modern society more concerned with child abuse than they were in the 70s.

I’m of two minds about this. I’ve long been an advocate for updating Country Bear Jamboree to include a few more songs (even if they lift them from the other versions of the show), but then add a bit of randomness to the performances you see each show. I think shortening the show is fine, might even increase the capacity a bit. The other side of me says that there’s a lot to said for the talent and vision of the original Imagineers who created this comic masterpiece. Why mess with success?

In case you can’t make it out the the Magic Kingdom before the 22nd, here is the full Country Bear Jamboree show as filmed on July 28, 2012.

Will you be more or less likely to stop in and pay a visit to the Country Bears if the new show is shorter.

13 thoughts on “Country Bear Jamboree to get the Tiki Treatment”

The show is already very tightly-written as it is and the songs in the show are already very short, so there’s really nothing to edit out. And the show is still popular and still does a great job of eating people up and spitting them back out as it is, plus the audiences DO continue to sit still for the entire show and enjoy every minute of it.

Plus, the show moves at a quick-enough pace already, unlike the Tiki Room in its original length. And editing the show would be an added expense that they probably wouldn’t want to pay for anyway.

And when I say that the audience laughs at every minute of the show, that includes the “Little Buford” song. I almost always hear the audience laugh at the “shoot him instead” punchline, which, to me, indicates that there are still at least some folks out there who take it as nothing more than a joke.

There’s also a rumor that they will eliminate “Blood on the Saddle”. I love CBJ but I will seriously no longer visit the attraction if this segment is removed. Not only will they have eliminated Big Al’s only song, they will completely destroy the climax of the show (Big Al reprising his song while everyone else performs the finale).

My husband hates CBJ, but my son loves it, so I took him last year. It is hokey and really old-fashioned, but the thing that bothered me the most was how tired and shabby the performers themselves looked. Wish they would freshen them up a bit, even if they keep all the old songs. The place was packed at 9:00 at night, so clearly many people would disagree with my husband on the value of this attraction. Now if they would just bring back Mr. Toad…

This is still simply a rumor, so it’s nothing to get worked up about just yet. But on the off chance that this is true, however, I would not be one to blame the shortening of the show on modern audiences allegedly having shorter attention spans. This seems silly and rather inaccurate because every time I’ve seen the show, the audience has always appeared enthralled and engaged for the entire length of it. The world may be different in some ways from when the show first premiered, but I’m skeptical that an audience’s ability to view an enjoyable 15 minute show is such a casualty to the times. If the rumor is true and they’re removing “Mama don’t shoot little Buford” from the show, it would probably be due to PC reasons. This, however, I see as an equally silly reason considering no audience I’ve ever sat in has expressed offense to it. And if anyone ever actually was offended by this song, then they probably need to loosen up. I’ll still be filing this alleged tampering with the show under “rumor” for now.

I sat through the Country Bear Jam once and the Tiki Room twice and for both it was enough – Some of the attractions need to be updated or Universal Studios will bypass Disney in imagination and new fan favorite attractions.
Updating is a natural order today.

“I sat through the Country Bear Jam once and the Tiki Room twice and for both it was enough – Some of the attractions need to be updated or Universal Studios will bypass Disney in imagination and new fan favorite attractions.
Updating is a natural order today.”

They tried that for Tiki Room, remember? The reaction was not favorable. Hence why they reverted back to the original show once Iago caught on fire.

“They tried that for Tiki Room, remember? The reaction was not favorable. Hence why they reverted back to the original show once Iago caught on fire.”
The Tiki Room before the update was a ghost town and people frequently left the show early because it was simply a bunch of (not famous) robot birds mouth syncing to a tranquil (not famous) soundtrack. Although sweet, cool and a nice place to get away from it all with no waiting, it was not very entertaining, nor did it relate to ANYTHING.
The reaction to the updated attraction was not overwhelming, but the show seemed to draw more people, and I never saw anyone walk out of the show (once someone hurried out of the show, but it was an obvious emergency). The show could have been better and I thought they cut out too much of the original show, but I thought it was better, especially considering they had just themed that part of Adventureland as Agrabah.